ESPN's Chris Fowler: 'Severe challenges' to starting the 2020 college football season on time
ESPN’s Chris Fowler has similar concerns about the 2020 football season as his teammate Kirk Herbstreit.
Fowler, ESPN’s lead college football play-by-play announcer, told the “Dan Patrick Show” on Tuesday that there are “severe challenges” to getting the 2020 season started as scheduled in September. Sure, we all hope that’s what happens. But Fowler noted that we can’t simply hope for an alternate reality.
“Hope isn’t a strategy unless you’ve got truth and facts, right? We’ve already seen that,” Fowler said. “What’s realistic? And I don’t know if it’s really realistic to gather in 20 Saturdays and have a national season. You could have a lot of colleges online exclusively this summer; the campuses won’t even be open. So how can you bring this unpaid workforce back in there and say ‘Hey, we’re playing games’ without a bunch of people going ‘Wait, why are playing? What are we doing?”
Herbstreit was one of the first prominent names around college football to speak out about the possibility of a delayed or canceled 2020 season when he said that he wasn’t sure if football could be played until a vaccine for the COVID-19 coronavirus was produced.
His comments drew the rebuke of people like Kansas State athletic director Gene Taylor and Missouri coach Eliah Drinkwitz, though those comments are now looking less and less preposterous. Texas A&M chancellor John Sharp said a week ago that it was possible the season could start in October.
The severe challenges that Fowler noted include colleges and universities being open for in-person classes and state leaders allowing sporting events to happen. Football teams are going to need weeks of in-person preparation before the season and it’s impossible to assume that all 50 states and every single FBS university will be ready to roll when football season is set to begin. California Gov. Gavin Newsom has already said that he doesn’t foresee football starting as scheduled in his state.
And athletic departments need the season to begin. The revenue that football produces through television money and ticket sales help sustain numerous other sports. You can bet that college administrators are going to do everything in their power to play the season, even if it happens much later than anticipated. Fowler even mentioned the possibility of the season getting pushed to the spring, though he also noted through his comments that there isn’t much of a consensus among the vast network of athletic directors at the top level of college football.
“It might be a way to salvage football in the school year if it can’t be played in the fall,” he said.
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Nick Bromberg is a writer for Yahoo Sports.
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